In honor of OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I GOT TO SEE THE RAINCOATS PLAY LAST NIGHT today’s song is OBVIOUSLY going to be a Raincoats song.  The Raincoats are the kind of band who make me feel less alone in the world.  They are occasionally a little bit earnest in that “oh, the Second Wave” kind of way, but they are the kind of pioneers who really, really did pave the way for future feminist interventions in punk rock.  And when Gina Birth sang “you ask if I’m a feminist – well, why the hell wouldn’t I be?”  I was able to shelf my well-cultivated cynicism and actually earnestly join in feeling the earnestness.  And I almost cried, because The Raincoats have been one of my favorite bands forever.  It’s funny – I’ve always been all about getting teenage girls to pick up guitars, but really, the most powerful lady guitar moment I’ve witnessed was these middle-aged women totally rocking out and being amazing.

Only Loved At Night is a completely heartbreaking song, and I love it.  The odd, clockwork percussion and chiming guitars demarcate time in a very haunting way, and the vaguely impressionistic words paint a very tragic portrait.  The Raincoats have two very distinct songwriting voices working in the band – Gina Birch‘s songs provide quirky, awkward, lovely, sparkly and insightful wit; while Ana Da Silva’s songs often seem darker and more ellusive – and this song is classic Da Silva.  Here are the Raincoats in 1981:

And I can’t find a dress for the Raincoats.  I mean, I can, in my head.  I know exactly what it would look like.  That’s kind of how I work – I usually have a pretty clear mental image of what dress will go with each song, or sometimes I work backwards if I’ve seen a dress I like and want a song to match it, but I can’t come up with anything this time out.  And the dress I can envision for this song is kind of impossible, it’s like the platonic ideal of dresses that does not exist in the real world.  Because it would have to be sort of punky because that’s where the Raincoats came from, but it could never be all 1977 black and white and safety pins and torn fishnets because that just wouldn’t work.  It would have to be some kind of strange hybrid of Vivienne Westwood meets wild, spinster woman living in a cabin in the woods, who knows lots of herbal remedies and/or magic spells and would take me under her wing and teach me how to be unafraid.  This is how I picture a Raincoats dress, and this picture doesn’t translate to any kind of tangible reality.  So, dear readers, if you happen to see this dress around somewhere, do let me know.

Viv Albertine, late of The Slits, also played last night, and she was just lovely, too.  Again, there was that charming combination of earnestness and poetry and creatively unskilled musicianship about her that tends to be associated with that particular moment in girly punk rock in the UK.  And she told a hilarious story about how Vivienne Westwood wouldn’t let anybody wear brown because brown is too wishy-washy or something and punk rock had to be all black and white and contrasts.  There is no brown in punk rock.  The best moment in stage banter history came when she referred to 1970s British punk as “oh, the bleakness.”  And of course, some dude behind me was complaining that her songs weren’t any good, but of course he didn’t think they were any good.  Bands like the Slits and the Raincoats exist so outside of the criteria of what punk rock dudebro fandom would consider “good” that they are speaking an almost entirely different language.  And it’s so important for me that someone like Viv Albertine is still singing.  It’s really rare for me to find artists who can articulate  a perspective so close to my own in such a clear, poetic way, and I hope to god Viv and Ana and Gina live forever and keep making noise.